Windows 10 & Windows 8

Analyse The Hard Drives with Storage Sense on Windows 10

Before Windows 8.1, Windows doesn’t have a tool out of box that helps you analyse your hard drives and folders to find out what’s been filling up the storage space. Windows 8.1 has some basic feature that helps a bit. And now Microsoft brings Storage Sense, a storage management feature included in Windows Phone 8.1, into Windows 10 as a new feature for viewing the contents of your hard drive to help you get a glimpse of how all of those GBs on your hard drive are being used.

Go to Settings app, then System and Storage, you will see a list of drives you have installed on your Windows 10 system.

Clicking any of the drives will take you to the Storage usage screen to show the detail breakdown how the storage is being utilized in pre-defined and color coded categories, System, Apps, Documents, Pictures, Music, Video, Mail, etc.

You can click each of the categories to see more details of what’s been filling up. For example, The System category shows how much spaces used for Windows, Virtual memory, Hibernation, and System restore, like below.

The Apps & features category shows the detail breakdowns of what apps are installed and how much spaces are used for the apps. You can search and sort the list to easily catch what can be removed to free some of the spaces if needed.

As you can see, it’s a pretty cool and comprehensive tool to get you some senses on what’s on your hard drive that runs Windows 10. If this doesn’t seem to be enough or you still prefer an old school way, check out these 5 free portable folder analysis tools for Windows.